If you’ve downloaded a Super Nintendo emulator within the last 5-6 years, you probably might have heard of Byuu, or at least used the emulator he wrote for the console (BSNES, now known as Higan). Byuu is one of the biggest names in the Super Nintendo and emulation “scenes” and for a good reason: He created the first cycle accurate Super Nintendo emulator and got it to the point where every game was playable, just like it would be on a real Super Nintendo.

Of course, having talent doesn’t exclude you from drama or being crazy on the internet, and as you can find from just searching Byuu on Warosu (a 4chan archive), he’s a highly polarizing figure in the emulation community as well. From a failed preservation project to being extremely stubborn on how he wants to handle emulation, Byuu has made a name for himself in other ways than just Super Nintendo emulation. Oh and did I mention he’s a furry that’s trooning out?

A cycle-accurate Super Nintendo emulator
Byuu’s story goes back to 2004, when he started work on an open-source Super Nintendo emulator designed to be cycle-accurate (as in, it runs games just like the real console does), and he named it BSNES. In 2004, Super Nintendo emulation was in a desolate state, lots of obscure games had major issues, and even some bigger games had issues, such as Star Fox running too fast. Byuu’s goal was to write a Super Nintendo emulator in the spirit of other accurate emulators like Nestopia or MAME, but with the Super Nintendo instead.

BSNES’s popularity and accuracy combined with his noble goal (that echoed that of the MAME project) gave him instant status and popularity in the retro gaming scene, especially as the mainstream media wrote articles about him.

Even during this time, there was still some drama related to his website, notably a feud between him and Kevin (admin of AssemblerGames) in which Kevin tried to pull a scam on Byuu by abusing eBay’s second chance system over a Nintendo branded CRT monitor from the kiosks he wanted for "emulation research", and this would resurface a few months ago when Kevin’s mismanagement of AssemblerGames caused every staff member to quit that site. However, after BSNES became mainstream, a lot of drama would eventually hit Byuu once his projects didn’t go as planned.

The next few years weren’t as active for Byuu. Once Super Nintendo emulation was far more accurate thanks to his emulator, Byuu lost focus somewhat as development of the SNES part of the emulator was mostly reduced to fixing obscure bugs and BSNES started to include more consoles with less accurate emulation (as the SNES side was considered just about complete). This led to a renaming of the emulator, from BSNES to Higan, which now supports other consoles with varying degrees of accuracy.

Despite this, Higan continued to be popular for Super Nintendo emulation with the emulator being implemented in the popular RetroArch project and the documentation and source being used to help improve other SNES related projects, such as the SNES9x emulator. The NEC chip emulator portion of the code was used to even help Stephen Hawking's voice system be emulated.

In 2014, his depression started to set in from his only talent being programming, spending the last 10 years of his life and lots of his money on a Super Nintendo emulator, and his failure to learn Japanese or drawing. He got older, realizing that he hadn’t done much with his life, and he posted a vent post to his website. He mentioned that he also was having health issues set in, and that he was going to take a break from Higan development to learn. This would be an earlier sign of his behavior pattern a few years later.

The $10,000 SNES package (And more drama tales)
The late 2016-early 2017 time period though was a turning point for Byuu’s internet reputation, as he went from a famous emulator developer to being seen as a source of drama in the community, and a bit of it has to do with how he handled a box of Super Nintendo cartridges. While his negative reputation was slowly building itself up as the fame got to his head, this is when it really exploded in his face.

One of Byuu’s main projects with regards to the SNES was a preservation project, to both dump and catalog the SNES library his way with checksums and info on each cartridge, especially as he wasn’t too satisfied with the efforts of other groups with the same objective like No-Intro.

Not long after the media circus about this, the USPS found his package, in the recovery center, and he wasn’t too thrilled. Afterwards, he decided to preserve SNES games….by just posting the hashes on his website and not posting his extremely accurate roms somewhere (not even in a stealthy way like you see with MAME). Furthermore, he found out that one of the games he had was undumped, so instead of sharing it he flexed it on Twitter. This didn’t give him many fans at all; especially not after nearly $10,000 worth in games being sent to him was lost with him having to go to patreon to beg for money to replace them.

This has led to Byuu being accused of being a dump hoarder on 4chan's /vr/ board, since a common habit in that subculture is when someone buys a rare game, posts pictures of it online, doesn’t spread a dump of it with some excuse (in Byuu’s case it’s “they’re gonna sue me”), but in reality it all comes down to “I have it and you don’t”, another form of flexing that rich and notable game collectors love to do, which leads to disaster if they die or if some lawyers come knocking at their door.

License Drama
Another source of drama has been Byuu’s licensing format. See, Higan is licensed under the GPL V3 license, which requires the full source code to be released of any piece of software that includes it. The main competitor to Higan is SNES9x, which has a notable no commercial use clause in its license, similar to the older MAME license. This had led to controversy with emulator authors such as the developers of LibRetro/Retroarch, angry at the license violations.

Byuu on FPGAs and Cemu
With the license violations (and accuracy issues) harming those emulator consoles I mentioned, the new trend in console clones has been high end FPGA (think like the entire SNES hardware programmed in a single freely programmable chip and you get the idea) based consoles with HDMI support, notably the Analogue NT and Analogue Super NT. These offer some advantages over emulators, like less latency or the ability to run real cartridges, while also offering HDMI output and upscaling settings,

Byuu also isn’t too thrilled about the existence of CEMU, a Nintendo Wii U Emulator that became popular when it was shown off running most Wii U games, including big name games like Smash or Zelda. While Byuu only makes around $300 on Patreon right now, CEMU makes around $10,000 a month on Patreon, and at it's peak it was pulling in around $18,000. This has resulted in Byuu acting somewhat salty over this, to the point of even saying he wouldn’t defend CEMU if Nintendo came after them.

First he commented on it in 2016, before he made a Patreon after another troon emulator dev whined nobody was supporting his GBA project.https://archive.fo/2autj

In 2017, CEMU's patreon dollars rolled in after the new hyped up Zelda game was running in it, and Byuu threw a fit, as it was both closed source and emulating games people gave a shit about wanting to see run on their PC.https://archive.fo/kDFBr

Byuu also suffers from some paranoia, and oftentimes he likes to lash out at numerous people, from the 4channers that don't quite like him to RetroArch lead dev TwinAphex (who's just as much of a dramacow in the scene as Byuu is). He also does not use his real name online at all thanks to his paranoia that the entire internet is harassing him, choosing a character name from an obscure Japan-only Super Nintendo game called Bahamut Lagoon.

Now, a lot of his friend circle consists of troon furry programmer “techie” troons and he takes pride in this, and few of the tweets on his furry account have anything to do with the fandom, mostly having to do with transgender issues and his nonbinary identity.

Furthermore, he actually calls people who criticize autogynephilia to be gatekeepers as well (a dodgy position even in the trans community), and he RTs both troons who believe in this kind of thing and “hilarious” troon memes. Hell, in this Tweet storm he's even telling those questioning their gender to do HRT to "experiment" with it.https://archive.fo/vujfG

Summary:
Byuu is a classic example of a programmer savant who completed his passion software project, and then once it was finished he slowly lost it. His public image is slowly burning away due to the failed project and conflicts with others in the scene, and trooning out might accelerate this.

I've said it a thousand times and I'll say it again, anyone who's into assembly programming is schizophrenic or otherwise batshit insane. You gotta be real intimate with the SNES' instruction set/assembly language to write an emulator for it.

I've said it a thousand times and I'll say it again, anyone who's into assembly programming is schizophrenic or otherwise batshit insane. You gotta be real intimate with the SNES' instruction set/assembly language to write an emulator for it.

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That sounds like waifu material to me, especially wishing that he knew more Japanese than typical weeb shit.

Also is that 20% taller a reference to MLP? Given he's a furry I wouldn't be surprised he watched that shit too.

Honestly the only thing of note Byuu's done since BSNES is developing the MSU-1 chip for Super Nintendo. Which is effectively rthe SNES-CD that never was, allowing CD-quality audio and FMV playback. It's a neat piece of tech that has been getting pretty heavily embraced lately, with a lot of really neat music hacks happening (like Final Fantasy VI: Dancing Mad, Orchestral Link to the Past, Aladdin with the movie score, Chrono Trigger, etc.)

Even during this time, there was still some drama related to his website, notably a feud between him and Kevin (admin of AssemblerGames) in which Kevin tried to pull a scam on Byuu by abusing eBay’s second chance system over a Nintendo branded CRT monitor from the kiosks he wanted for "emulation research", and this would resurface a few months ago when Kevin’s mismanagement of AssemblerGames caused every staff member to quit that site. However, after BSNES became mainstream, a lot of drama would eventually hit Byuu once his projects didn’t go as planned.

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Was this ever covered on the farms? Because Assembler first turning to shit and then being offline for three months plus (coming back soonTM) was getting really obnoxious. Then the site was back briefly and he was convinced to retire, never got the real story on it.

Was this ever covered on the farms? Because Assembler first turning to shit and then being offline for three months plus (coming back soonTM) was getting really obnoxious. Then the site was back briefly and he was convinced to retire, never got the real story on it.

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It wasn't, and I'd still need to think of a good title for a Community Watch thread on that community.

SupervisorTrue & Honest Fan

Honestly the only thing of note Byuu's done since BSNES is developing the MSU-1 chip for Super Nintendo. Which is effectively rthe SNES-CD that never was, allowing CD-quality audio and FMV playback. It's a neat piece of tech that has been getting pretty heavily embraced lately, with a lot of really neat music hacks happening (like Final Fantasy VI: Dancing Mad, Orchestral Link to the Past, Aladdin with the movie score, Chrono Trigger, etc.)

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It really sucks he went down the way he did given how he easilly could have just kept doing stuff for his simulator, and not act like a whiny little non-binary bitch on twitter. But this is the way the world works these days, so I shouldn't be too optimistic with people like Byuu.

Side note, how long do you guys think it'll take for the furry to find this thread?

Too bad he didn't market himself to software companies instead of wallowing his pride to the point it cause him his sanity. Its pretty hard to market yourself when your name is associated with a pedo fursona.

It really sucks he went down the way he did given how he easilly could have just kept doing stuff for his simulator, and not act like a whiny little non-binary bitch on twitter. But this is the way the world works these days, so I shouldn't be too optimistic with people like Byuu.

Side note, how long do you guys think it'll take for the furry to find this thread?

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Hopefully sooner rather than later, most cows do make some quality content when they find their own threads. At least I enjoy it anyways.

Too bad he didn't market himself to software companies instead of wallowing his pride to the point it cause him his sanity. Its pretty hard to market yourself when your name is associated with a pedo fursona.

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No kidding. Bsnes is a legitimately impressive emulator and it wouldn't take much to market that in a resume or job interview.

"So, it says here you spent your free time making a program that plays bootleg videogames?"

"Actually, it's an emulator that's designed to recreate every hardware command in a videogame console in order to flawlessly create the same experience one would have playing the original device. I have some more detailed information here if you're interested..."

See? Even if you sperg a little, that makes you stand out and show off legit skills you learned.

But Byuu, being Byuu, would probably go on a tangent about how the interviewers are probably heretic scum who use .SMC files instead of .SFC for their SNES games, followed by storming out, tripping over a chair leg and spilling pictures of his underage fursona all over the place.

I respected Byuu, honestly, despite him being a sperg for fifteen years. But Bsnes is done, it's complete, and now he's just making a fool of himself.

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